The Human Condition Quotes

There is a reason the word belonging has a synonym for want at its center; it is the human condition.
- Jodi Picoult

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment.
- Elizabeth Gilbert

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.
- Maya Angelou

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
- Hannah Arendt

What you might see as depravity is, to me, just another aspect of the human condition.
- Asia Argento

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.
- William Shatner

I really believe that all of us have a lot of darkness in our souls. Anger, rage, fear, sadness. I don't think that's only reserved for people who have horrible upbringings. I think it really exists and is part of the human condition. I think in the course of your life you figure out ways to deal with that.
- Kevin Bacon

I look at life, the experiences I've had, at the human condition, the dynamics between people, the news (world news), and draw from the compelling realities all around us.
- Leslie Banks

The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.
- Laird Barron

I flopped on the overstuffed kitchen couch and watched him go. I wondered what would happen to all his films and photographs in the upstairs closet - the documentaries on homelessness and drug addiction, the funny short subjects, the half-finished romantic comedy, the boxes of slice-of-life photographs that spoke volumes about the human condition. I wondered how you stop caring about what you've ached over, sweated over. (Thwonk)
- Joan Bauer

the best existential analysis of the human condition leads directly into the problems of God and faith
- Ernest Becker

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
- Albert Camus

With the single exception of the American Revolution, the aftermath of all revolutions from 1789 on only worsened the human condition.
- Arnold Beichman

This idea of how everything is interconnected, and the impermanence of things. It sums up the human condition to me, and it helps me on my path.
- Jeff Bridges

[He] believed both love and hate to be irrelevant. To him, they were "impediments of the human condition," and, in his words again, "imagine what could be accomplished if the human race would only shed its humanity.
- Max Brooks

So it is the human condition that to wish for the greatness of one's fatherland is to wish evil to one's neighbors. The citizen of the universe would be the man who wishes his country never to be either greater or smaller, richer or poorer.
- Voltaire

Such then is the human condition, that to wish greatness for one's country is to wish harm to one's neighbors.
- Voltaire

I think what makes people fascinating is conflict, it's drama, it's the human condition. Nobody wants to watch perfection.
- Nicolas Cage

Anyway, madness and genius. They're the disturbed pals of the human condition. The Bonnie and Clyde, the Thelma and Louise, the baking soda and vinegar. Insanity just walks alongside the brilliant like some creepy, insistent shadow.
- Deb Caletti

She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition.
- Angela Carter

I think the themes in my songs are very similar from the first album to the newest one. It's all about the human condition and how we are all trying to learn to live with each other and survive love and life.
- Deana Carter

The human condition is imperfection. And that's how it's supposed to be.
- Katherine Center

The human condition today is better than it's ever been, and technology is one of the reasons for that.
- Tom Clancy

Things change all the time, and they'll probably never be the same again. It's just the natural evolution of the human condition. Things change, and whatever it is is what it is. I mean, you try to start second guessing that, you either get rich or die broke.
- Guy Clark

We like to believe that, in our lifetime, the human condition is improving.
- Nick Clooney

Everyone needs help. That's the human condition.
- Max Allan Collins

I ma trying to feel more well adjusted than I really am, which is, I guess, the human condition.
- Douglas Coupland

The Tragedy of the human condition is that the very things that make us interesting and culturally important and progressively brilliant are our differences; and these are also the principle reasons for our prejudices
- Bryce Courtenay

The psychic entropy peculiar to the human condition involves seeing more to do than one can actually accomplish and feeling able to accomplish more than what conditions allow.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.
- Milan Kundera

Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
- Michel De Montaigne

I'm a sensitive guy; I respond to things that make my eyes well up a little bit, or make me root for people. I find the human condition interesting.
- Fred Durst

The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved.
- George Dzundza

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
- Terry Eagleton

I think you can tell the human condition better through comedy.
- Hector Elizondo

I think it's unfair, but they have the right as fallible, screwed-up humans to be unfair; that's the human condition.
- Albert Ellis

There must be possible a fiction which, leaving sociology and case histories to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of the fairy tale.
- Ralph Ellison

Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of the human condition. No, they proclaimed morality as an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.
- Steven Erikson

We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.
- Frantz Fanon

There's a sadness to the human condition that I think music is good for. It gives a counterpoint to the visual beauty, and adds depth to pictures that they wouldn't have if the music wasn't there.
- Mike Figgis

Don't attach yourself to anyone who shows you the least bit of attention because you're lonely. Lonliness is the human condition. No one is ever going to fill that space. The best thing you can do it know yourself... know what you want.
- Janet Fitch

It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.
- Charles De Foucauld

Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
- E O Wilson

I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
- Jonathan Frakes

She patted him on the arm. "You're fucked up, Mister. But you're cool."
"I believe that's what they call the human condition," said Shadow.
- Neil Gaiman

Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.
- Bob Geldof

I think Shakespeare had a lot to contribute with his understanding of the human condition.
- Sharon Gless

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.
- Frank Herbert

The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.
- Frank Herbert

I love the art form of songwriting. I get to carry a lot of vibes to a lot of people. My songs are all about the human condition, and people will be able to find themselves in my songs.
- Glenn Hughes

Healthy people are those who live in healthy homes on a healthy diet; in an environment equally fit for birth, growth work, healing, and dying... Healthy people need no bureaucratic interference to mate, give birth, share the human condition and die.
- Ivan Illich

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
- Eugene Ionesco

Acting is usually regarded as a wholly narcissistic pursuit but there really is a hunger in me to unravel the human condition.
- Jason Isaacs

I want to create a seventeen-syllable word that encompasses the human condition, and then use that word to form the world's most perfect haiku.
- Jarod Kintz

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.
- Diane Keaton

We all have to lead double lives, not just celebrities. The face we put on publicly with our jobs and certain situations. I think that's part of the human condition.
- Greg Kinnear

Most climbers aren't in fact deranged, they're just infected with a particularly virulent strain of the Human Condition.
- Jon Krakauer

These are pictures of the people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw, poster children for the human condition.
- Anne Lamott

Gambling is part of the human condition. I love it. I have the best time gambling. I've been winning fortunes, and I've been losing them.
- Jerry Lewis

I enjoy learning about different periods and people, and then taking what's universal about the human condition and seeing where it matches up. No matter where you are, certain things unite everybody.
- Laura Linney

Okay, I thought. Here you are. You are here. And you move forward because
that's the way it works; that's the only place u can go. You keep going
until it stops hurting, or until you find new things to hurt you worse, I
guess. And that is the human condition, all of us lurching along in our own private miseries, because that's the way it is. Because, I guess, God didn't give us any choice. You grow up, I remembered Abigail telling me. You learn.
- Jennifer Weiner

The obsessions we have are pretty much the same our whole lives. Mine are people, the human condition, life.
- Mary Ellen Mark

I like real problems, the human condition - twisted, darker stuff.
- Drea De Matteo

If you look at the human condition today, not everyone is well fed, has access to good medical care, or the physical basics that provide for a healthy and a happy life.
- Ralph Merkle

We are naive and moralistic women. We are human beings who find politics a blight upon the human condition. And do not know how one copes with it except through politics.
- Kate Millett

As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.
- Alan Moore

The real value of any human endeavor lies in how far it advances the human condition.
- Robert Morrow

You can learn all about the human condition from covering the crime beat in a big city - you don't need to go to Beirut for that - but a foreign correspondent begins to understand poverty from a different perspective.
- P J Orourke

For anyone with half a brain they can see that this play is about the human condition.
- Estelle Parsons

I try to say something about the human condition whenever I can when I'm lucky.
- Mandy Patinkin

Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
- Octavio Paz

...A person who is headstrong enough to open their eyes and their heart to the full depth and weight of the world is inviting in everything out there - both evil and good, both dark and light, and the sheer bravery of that openness enables them to gain profound insight into the human condition. It also fucks them up. It may even make them more prone to stick their head in an oven than to engage in self-promotional chitchat on Jay Leno.
- Patricia Pearson

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.
- Walker Percy

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.
- Mordecai Richler

Most good actors have a huge intelligence about the human condition and a real open heart to different kinds of people and behavior.
- Tim Robbins

One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray.
- Tom Skerritt

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
- George Soros

I don't ever expect to be permanently happy. I don't think that's part of the human condition.
- Rick Springfield

Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get.
- Miguel Syjuco

My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so: I am a storyteller.
- William Trevor

Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.
- Joss Whedon

Becauseequality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women. And the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.
We need equality. Kinda now.
- Joss Whedon

Misogyny... is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it.
- Joss Whedon

Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, and thirst...But me and you, we don't have to feel them things...We can turn off the human condition.
So maybe we're closer to the angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality.
The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we're capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.
- Daniel H Wilson

The tales of Elfland do not stand or fall on their actuality but on their truthfulness, their speaking to the human condition, the longings we all have for the Faerie Other.
- Jane Yolen